In this dev video we briefly ramble on about the atmosphere systems in SpaceSlog, amongst other things.
The atmosphere systems are now mostly done and our focus has been turned to Ai.
Tag: alien
Mod Support in SpaceSlog | Devlog #2
In this update video we focus on the importance of mod support in SpaceSlog plus various other ramblings.
Being the creator of a popular Game of Thrones mod i know creating mods can be time consuming and can be met with certain restrictions. Modding is fun, and for some the fun part can be overcoming such restrictions. For SpaceSlog we aim to remove as many of those restrictions as possible, allowing people to create the exact modification they wish.
My work within the modding scene over the last decade has also influenced the reasons why i want SpaceSlog to be as fully modifiable as possible. We go into these reasons a little bit in the video and show whats currently possibly. We also talk a little bit about what we expect for the future. Of course all of this comes down to the scope of the game and how long we can actually spend on development. Which also depends on how popular the game will be, or if at all.
Improvements to core features
With the initial test build released on Itch.io i have spent a bit of time making improvements to some of the core features of the game to improve usability.
When multi selecting an item it will now only select up to 200 items of that type, this should help performance if you have too many objects that are the same. I also removed the ability to multi select hull pieces as there are always quite a few of these for each ship. There should also not be any reason for you wanting to multi select all hull.
To further improve performance, I added a VisibilityNotifier to each Entity in the game, this is a node provided by the Godot engine and allows us to check which items are being shown on the screen, or what the player can actually see. Using this we can now make sure only those on the actual screen will be selected.
I further improved the multi build tool adding new sounds to let the player know when the multi build has started. Unfortunately you cannot hear those sounds in the gif below. I now need to allow multi build for removing build objects and blueprints.
Skin and Hair Colours
I have moved skin and hair colours into a separate JSON file. This allows modders to easily change what colours they want in the game and for which race to assign them to. As you can see below, the pawn data file accepts an array of colour categories, this means you can create separate categories of skin tones and add as many as you want to each race.
This also means you could have different coloured skin tones for humans too if you really wanted.
Title Screen Artwork
Our current artist Leone Simonetti (You can find more of his work here) has created new background artwork for the title screen. Although the previous art looked very good i did not think it fits the intended atmosphere of the game correctly. Hopefully the new art created by Leone better encapsulates that feeling of being lost in the vast emptiness of space with a smattering of lonely alien planets and derelict space stations that can be explored. You can probably see some influences here from The Expanse too.
Let me know what you think!